Move over, vinyl: Taking their cue from the wildly successful Record Store Day, some lovers of the lowly but resurgent cassette tape format have launched International Cassette Store Day, which will take place Sept. 7 and feature limited-edition cassette releases from The Flaming Lips, The Pastels, Nick Cave’s The Birthday Party and more.
According to the U.K. organizers (via NME), there will be a launch party in London with similar events at record stores in Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo, among other cities in the U.S., U.K. and Europe.
The event’s organizers write:
No longer the inadequate, younger sibling of Vinyl and CD, the humble Cassette has been making a resurgence of late. Proving that cassette tapes are not just for those of us who remember buying Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ with birthday money, or making lovingly compiled mixtapes for the object of our teenage affections. International Cassette Store Day 2013 is a celebration of a physical product that is accessible, fun, cheap and still going strong in the turbulent current musical climate.
A full list of releases has yet to be announced, but participating labels include the event’s organizers SEXBEAT (Fucked Up), Kissability (TBA) and Suplex Cassettes (Fair Ohs, Proper Ornaments), as well as Transgressive (At The Drive-In, Pulled Apart By Horses), Bella Union (The Flaming Lips), Domino (The Pastels), 4AD (Deerhunter, The Birthday Party), Blood & Biscuits (Efterklang) and more.
Keep an eye on cassettestoreday.com for the full release list and participating stores.
Cassette resurgence? This is why everyone hates hipsters. Cassettes sucked the first time around and they suck worse now
THIS IS AWESOME!!!
Betting you have a few hundred thousand sitting in boxes in the basement of that place?
Call me old fashioned but I prefer the digital format.
On one hand I’m thankful the skinny beard/jeans/glasses types aren’t attempting another resurrection of swing bands/dancing as it’s due another attempt. On the other, how long before 8-Track Day?
I’m sorry, but what a DUMB idea. What’s next, the Betamax revolution? I’m all about nostalgia, but who the hell even has a cassette player anyway? Records I get, this….not so much.
Echoing most of the naysayers here, I also view this as a total waste of time and anyone’s money. Completely disposable and forgettable.
I’m all for buying music on physical media (as opposed to downloads, streaming and so forth), but I don’t see any point to reviving the cassette format besides nostalgia. Even if you don’t like CDs, cassette tapes probably don’t have the dynamic range of a good LP record, and they hiss! Makes no sense.
PS @ Scott Stalcup — HA! That comment made my day!
As did yours make mine, lotus.
Have a brilliant weekend of it!
I have to admit: Cassettes were cool in the ’70s and 80s, and “the nostalgia thing” is great, and it would be cool if brand new albums were released in a limited edition of tapes, but, I LOVE MY CDs, and get enough of a modernized feel for tape-playing w/ my ever-trusty Discman that is constantly being used to my wondrous enjoyment. I don’t at all miss having to let my pencils “get friendly” w/ the holes of my cassettes, nor the snags, breaks, etc. But, for the time, it was fun, and very convenient, still more interesting than this constant downloading thing.
Funny, my Dad still has his car radio tape deck from 1997, and hasn’t changed it yet. I do admit, on his great luxury car sound system, the rock and pop tapes from the 1990s still sound excellent. I wonder where this tape retro thing will occur in my town?
I also have to admit: 8-tracks of classic and (some) modern albums would be very exotic in the 21st Century. Maybe we should split the difference: package certain CDs to look like 8-tracks, this way we’ll have the best of both worlds.
It did drive one mad, trying to get to the songs you wanted to hear, in the order you wanted to hear them…kind of like the twisted, psychotic, multiple-personality disordered Father of the I-Pod. But they were fun to have.